Day: July 4, 2018

I’ve read more than one thinkpiece (please don’t try that at home or anywhere else, for that matter) that compared Hannah Gadsby’s brilliant one-woman show, Nanette, to Tig Notaro’s performance at Largo when she first revealed she had cancer. All of which only makes me appreciate Notaro’s own 2018 Netflix special even more. Called Happy To Be Here, the hour finds Notaro successfully on the other side of tragedy and health scares. So, as I wrote in my review for Decider, she can delightfully return to her wickedly dry sense of humor without needing an emotionally cathartic beat. Although...

I can’t tell you how many acquaintances of mine have asked me about Ali Wong in the past couple of years. No, wait. Actually, I can tell you how many. ALL OF THEM. Wong burst into the mainstream as the first comedian to become an “overnight sensation” thanks to Netflix with the release of her first special, Baby Cobra, on Mother’s Day 2016. And wouldn’t you know it, two years later, she dropped both another baby and another comedy baby, with Hard Knock Wife. From, ‘Hey look, comedians can get pregnant and still work and be funnier than you,’...

If you had told me 11 years ago that the quiet guy in the condo Shane Mauss let me crash in during the final HBO US Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen would turn out to be comedy giant-killer, I may never have believed you. But I’ve enjoyed watching Hari Kondabolu’s comedy and career blossom in the years since we first met in the middle of a blizzard. He really began to come into his own when W. Kamau Bell hired him as a writer/correspondent on the FX/FXX talker Totally Biased. And Kondabolu has taken center stage both directly and...

John Mulaney is one of the best stand-up comedians working today. Although probably not today as it’s a holiday, but you get it. And even if you don’t get it, and need all the qualifiers, Mulaney definitely probably is the best cis heterosexual privileged white male in the stand-up trade in 2018. His most recent stand-up special, Kid Gorgeous, came out on Netflix in May. As I wrote then in my review for Decider: John Mulaney may have written the most timeless Trump joke a decade ago, when few others in comedy cared enough to bother tackling The Donald...